For those of you who have a website to which you would like to attract traffic, then you have two Internet marketing options from which to choose. Firstly, you could take the unpaid route using search engine optimization (SEO) which works on the natural results produced by search engines or you could go the search engine marketing (SEM) route of paid searches. An Internet marketing campaign can involve both SEO and SEM but whether your campaign will need to use one or the other or both will depend on the type of website you have and what you are trying to achieve with it.
Business owners with websites that they are using to advertise their business and bring in potential customers are probably in the best position to benefit from paid searches, although SEO will also work for them. Personal websites, on the other hand, tend to be heavily content based, particularly those in blog format, and are not advertising a product or business as such. Of course, the owner of a blog based website might also be selling their own wares such as jewellery that they have made, for example, so blog websites cannot be discounted as having a need for paid search. Ultimately, the need for paid search is linked to having a service or product that you want to sell, on your advertising budget (which we will not go into here), and on your aims as a business owner. It is a given that you would want paid search to help you sell a product or service because it shows results fast. You are paying the search engines to advertise your website in their indices as opposed to using natural search results which typically take much longer to take effect. So this is the main reason why you would want to use paid search, but what are the other reasons that one might want to use paid search?
Paid search can assist with building a traffic of a specific nature to your website such as a niche group of Internet searchers who are looking for websites like yours. It is easy to get lost on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), particularly if you don't make it onto the first page.
If you are interested in dominating the SERPs, then you might want to adopt a two-pronged approach and use both SEO and SEM to get your website into both the list of results and the paid side bar concurrently.
Paid search is good for when you have a special offer to promote that has an expiry date. Special offers are highly tempting calls to action because they have an attached benefit. People find it hard to resist something being offered for a special price or for free with a purchase, so you want as many people as possible to see that you have a special offer which will, in turn, encourage then to visit your site.
It may be that your website is not friendly to search engines but you don't want to change it. Certain website templates and design features are not naturally friendly to search engines but if you prefer not to change them for whatever reason, then you can offset this with paid search.
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